A Jeep and a GPS, they go together like kids and candy.
And they stand as symbols of two of my favorite past times; exploring the back roads in south-western BC, and geocaching!
It's on these pages I've brought together trip reports I've written while back roading, and stories when out geocaching.
Hope you enjoy the stories.....

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Caching Along Harrison Lake West FSR

On Saturday Sept 13 I had the pleasure of hosting a geocaching event for some of the local members of the BCGA. I lead a group of people in five 4X4s as we cached north along the west side of Harrison Lake.

We met at the Tim Hortons in Mission in the central Fraser Valley where we all enjoyed a large morning cup of coffee to help wake us up; the breakfast sandwiches were pretty good too!

After ensuring we were all the folks that were going to show up, we picked a rendezvous point at Weaver Creek Fish Hatchery where we would drop off some of the cars, move the ride alongs over to the 4X4s, and find our first cache!

A total of 14 caches were found on the trip today that stretched more than 50 miles from Harrison Mills in the south, to the Tipella logging camp at the north end of Harrison Lake. By my total we were on gravel roads for approx 110 miles; roads that were at times good graded gravel that you could only curse due to the dust, to no road at all as the road was washed away by the water running down the old road bed. At times we struggled to see over the hoods as the front end was pointed decidedly uphill towards the sky!

Rather than go into all the caches we found explaining their names, locations, etc, I can show you! This time out I took my new cam corder for it's inaugural outing, and I put it to good use. I shot off 45 minutes of film, which I have edited down to about 30 minutes.

You can view the videos here on YouTube; look for the three part Harrison Lake FSR Tour videos. Or you can search Youtube for tjguy98 to find my channel.

Start with Part 1 (of course), then Part 2 and Part 3 to keep the story line in order.

Enjoy the videos and hope it makes you feel like you were right there with us......minus the dust....and the heat.....and the bumping around in the washed out sections of road.....and the crashing through the bush to find the caches getting all scratched up with what I'm sure is poison ivy!!!!!

Other than those little differences, you'll feel like you were there!

PS For those of you who really wanted to come along but didn't, read the write up right after you have dumped the bag from the vacuum cleaner all over your hair. THEN you'll get the idea of how we felt at the end of those 110 miles of FSR travelling.